PicHit.Me Gets $3M Investment To Expand Its Corwdsourced Photo Market
We are immensly proud to announce that PicHit.Me, a crowdsourcing photo marketplace startup, has secured its first external funding . To be precise, it closed a $3 million early expansion funding round led by VC firm Almi Invest.
The Swedish-based startup was only founded in 2012, but has already collaborated with big players like Microsoft, Nokia and UKTI, making itself stand out from the competition and focusing on office workers as the target audience.
These are precisely the people who need to spice up zheir slideshows with something eyecatching and noteworthy. Instead of scavanging Google Images for inspiration and illustrations, they can search PicHit.Me, a legitimate place for people to locate and search through them by sending a “mission” request to the global network of photographers powering PicHit.Me’s photo marketplace.
Co-founders Mathias Björkholm, Henrik Bergqvist and Mattias Brodén believe PicHit.Me’s main competition to be “ignorance, Google and Bing“ and their goal is to limit image piracy. They explained the priciple of the thing for Tech Crunch:
We are giving the normal user of photos a simple and understandable license to use the photo. Get inspired, get informed and get the right photo, with the right intellectual property rights from the crowd.
There is a freemium option, with some restrictions like longer photo request delivery time, but the monthly fee of 15 dollars per person is much lower than copyright infringement fines.
In PicHit.Me’s photo marketplace, anyone can create photo assignments and everyone is free to contribute photos and be rewarded for the ones that gets used. The photographers can earn money via the marketplace in different ways. For example, you can get a set amount if your image is the one chosen by the user through competition, but there’s also a basic reward level for those photographers actively contributing to PicHit.Me. The contributors equally share 20% of the total subscription revenue, PicHit.Me takes 40% of these revenues, and the final 40% is distributed based on how much an individual photographer’s images are used.
Users, some „ten thousands of them“, can access it via web, through PowerPoint, or Winodws Phone mobile platform.
A Fund Manager at Almi Invest commented on this investment:
PicHit.Me will be our next Swedish innovation export. They carry out a paradigm shift by offering a global network for photographers and users. PicHit.Me breaks old patterns and alter behaviour in a positive way.
Congratulations to PocHit.Me, we know they will use the investment well!
